Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Roving Eye: No Newspaper Trust, Let Our Genomes Go, A Mundane Singularity

A fundamental value problem. Jeff Nolan has a smart post on why creating an online consortium of newspapers won't solve their problems. RTWT. A newspaper is already a bundle of information of various types, a bundle whose value is breaking down. Putting together a bunch of these bundles into a super aggregation of some sort doesn't fix the fundamentally broken premise. Even creating new bundles sliced along topical lines may be problematic unless there's some fundamental rethinking: The Associated Press is such a topical bundle and it's not exactly covering itself in glory. As Jeff points out, some deeper rethinking about both the cost and product side is required.

Chocolate is love. and it's good for you, too. Put it on the healthy diet list right next to red wine. More proof that your favorite deity wants you to be happy.

Bio-nannies on the march. Our betters in the California Department of Health are taking it taking it upon themselves to send out 'cease and desist' notices to companies providing genomic marker scans direct to consumers. It's less than clear that the laws about 'diagnostic' tests apply to results intended for general information, given that there's no immediate therapeutic intent. It is clear that California state government continues to drive the innovation golden goose to other locales.

While we're discouraging investment. Ever time a US oil refinery goes down for maintenance or due to an accident, the price of gasoline and other products spikes. The refining process runs right at the edge of being a choke point in our energy supply, and any glitch affects the end supply and hence the price point. That might have something to do with the fact there have been no new refineries built here since 1976. Perhaps some fresh investment would be in order. But no, the House Democrats think we should nationalize them instead. What a fine move to send any potential expansion capital running the other way. The Democrats are economic illiterates, or just don't care.

Train travel is a luxury. Trying to turn long distance routes into an alternative to air travel is inherently flawed. Charlie Martin runs the numbers. Commuter rail can make money, if not run by politicians. The long haul routes are for those out for adventure, not for business people on a schedule. Repackage and reprice them accordingly.

alt.singularity A nice catalog of potential technology breakthroughs that could lead to a 'singularity', without requiring either human-equivalent AI or de novo molecular scale nano-engineering. While these two seem to be articles of faith for some singularists, they both have the problem of a very low observed learning rate. Regardless of theoretical possibility, capital requirements and technology path dependency suggest that nanotech will emerge from some combination of carbon chemistry and silicon processing. Human replication seems to be going nowhere fast; emphasizing complementary and symbiotic intelligences in the machine phase seems more the ticket. It's good to see so many other break-out possibilities, given my skepticism on these two.

The Roving Eye: Yahoo Bleeds, Credit Meets Nicotine, The Underbelly of Higher Ed

Once is an accident, twice is coincidence... Jeff Weiner. Jeremy Zawodny. JR Conlin.. All apparently headed to startups or funders thereof. (Update: Usama Fayyad as well.) Come on, purple and yellow, don't just lie there, do something! Even other people's startups have figured out how to leverage your under-worked community assets.

Forex for Dummies as well as the rest of us. Here's a well-done tutorial on the ups and downs of the dollar, from a group of Bay Area money managers.

This is your brain on credit. A fascinating study suggests that paying with credit rather than cash partially disengages the cost function. (HT: Maggie's Farm.) So there's a scientific basis for the recommendation of some of my favorite personal finance books to dump the credit cards. I'd also say, from personal experience, that running a rigorous household budget may have the same effect, assuming you pay off your cards each month - and you do, right? Whether it's cash, debit or credit, it all gets marked off against a balance, the only thing that varies is when. Most people can figure out that pain delayed is still pain, but...

This is your brain on cigs. The latest American Scientist brings a piece on another study, a combined behavioral and MRI look at differences between nicotine addicts and others in a stock market simulation. Seems the addicts lose the ability to process what the experimenters call 'fictive signals' - what those of us with an economic bent would call opportunity costs. Do you suppose these two groups of researchers should be comparing notes?

In the belly of the beast. Adjunct 'Professor X' at Unknown College pens an Atlantic piece on the woes of teaching English lit and comp to those of marginal academic abilities. This all sounds very familiar. About 25 years ago I spent some time as an adjunct, in computer science, at a community college in Flint, Michigan, motivated by a need to keep the wolf away from the door as well as sampling the teaching option before plunging into the commercial world. Two weeks into the first term I was bemoaning the fact that I could see myself easily flunking half the students, based on their complete inability to handle systematic problem solving, let alone actual programming. My fellow slave laborers opined that it was normal, and the best thing I could do is persuade them to drop the course while they could still get a refund. Yeah, I been there. 

Glenn Reynolds has talked about a current bubble in higher education, and if you count back the years, my experience was at the height of the fad for retraining autoworkers. There is one other factor in common: Some of my students were driven into the classroom to escape the consequences of a local economy wrecked by a combination of auto company management incompetence and auto union arrogance. And a lot of today's lower echelon students are driven there because their high school diplomas mean little as a credential, due to...

The Roving Eye: Arrrrr Is For Robot, Following the Genomics Learning Curve, More Public Finance Follies

Talk like a pirate day for bots? Just as plenty of alternative uses have been found for formerly mil-only spy sats, so the applications for robots keep expanding. Here a report that a US Navy underwater droid trial resulted in finding new artifacts near a Revolutionary era ship wreck. Development budget hurting? Try turning your AUV loose in certain Caribbean and Florida waters, maybe.

Tick. Reports of an inaugural meeting of would-be hobbyist biological engineers. Today Cambridge, MA - tomorrow, ?

Tick. Biologist Richard Lenski at my alma mater, Michigan State has a long-running experiment to follow evolutionary trends in thousands of generations of fast-reproducing E. coli. Seems he's now made the first observation of a two-step mutational change that gave his bacteria the ability to utilize a different nutrient. If you don't know enough to engineer what you want, get nature to do it for you.

GOOG + Open Office = LUV? Should Google embrace Open Office? It's hard to see what they'd have to lose by doing so. My own experiments with Google Docs showed it can hit scaling limits due to bandwidth and/or server scheduling pretty quickly. Sometimes you just need a locally-hosted interface or computational engine. Microsoft has long been engaged in gilding the --- something nastier than a lily --- on Office. Each generation has a little more feature creep, cuts off more backward compatibility, and fails to address long-standing usability problems. Apple's shown there's a need for a light and usable alternative. Google could simply exploit this opportunity in a more mainstream fashion than Jobs & Co. ever will, and could create a smooth transition from/back to their SaaS offering. I'd say go for it!

The land of negative ROI. In what world does every dollar sunk into capex guarantee you will lose more operationally? That would be government-run mass transit in the US. Long viewed as a combination of make-work spoils program and welfare for the riders, every buck 'invested' means a larger system that can't cover its opex, let along depreciation and additional capex. Out here in the Bay Area, we have a heavy rail system running at near capacity due to the gas price rise, and it still can't cover its costs. Something smells rotten.

Fleecing NYC of a half billion bucks. That's apparently the amount of unfunded public pension liability covered up by an actuary who just happened to be an employee of the city, and therefore a beneficiary of the programs he was supposed to be vetting. Someone who did this in private industry would be in jail for fraud. Why isn't he? And people are running for office based on the idea of government controlling more of the economy.

The Roving Eye: Power Sources, The Future of Tanning, Amazing Mazes

Aluminum smelters and data centers. Are alike in needed abundant and reliable electrical power. So the Columbia River valley is growing a crop of server farms. The Economist article notes that virtualization technology can be applied to migrate processing to where the juice is cheaper, as well as optimize the number of servers powered up to handle the given workload. Indeed, virtualization management startups are being reflagged as 'green' as fast as the PPT decks and web sites can be rewritten. Remapping the network connections, storage and other resources used by virtualized processes could sink any savings into a sea of management overhead if not optimized as well.

RIP, Robert Asprin. John Scalzi reports the passing of the well-known fantasy author. His Thieves' World was one of the more enjoyable multi-author sword and sorcery creations. Some few us also remember him as "Yang the Nauseating" in days gone by. I can think of far worse ways to go than on a couch, reading an SF novel.

All that time video-gaming was not wasted. At least if you want to join the Army or Marines and use the real thing. Designers of weapons and other interactive systems can now take facility with game controllers, computers, and networks for granted. We've come a long ways from the days when we tracked down (still abundant) naive users to try out our latest designs.

Hope for the pasty white? Perhaps for future generations: While I was paying attention to other things, the genetics behind human skin pigmentation were figured out. Seems that crosses between the melanin endowed and those less so 'average down', towards the paleface end. Not to fear, given the worldwide genome pool, a few more generations of 747s, migration and out-marriage, and everyone will come with a decent base tan pre-installed. It will be a more boring but perhaps more peaceful world, and fewer engineers will have to brave carcinoma to lose their hacker's pallor.

Speaking of microloans for mobiles. Here's a report by Kevin Kelly on a talk by Iqbal Quadir, founder of the original loans for village and family mobile phones program in Bangladesh.

Concrete Spaghetti. You think the MacArthur Maze is a mess? Check out these feats of civil engineering in Japan.

The Roving Eye: A Plan for MSFT - or GOOG, NYT Beats Its Sector, Fred And The Future, and More!

NC, anyone? Don Park has an idea for getting Microsoft out of the Vista trap: Put out an 'operating system' that's just a sandboxed browser, and sell backend services and upgrades. Buy just what you need, not have the whole glutinous mass thrust down your throat. Just one problem for the strategy, as exposed by commenter Rob Breidecker: "Google should do this as well". No, Google should be doing that instead - they don't have a current revenue stream to protect, and they are building a suite of apps that are perforce stripped down to work in a browser environment.

You go, Pinch!. The entire newspaper sector posted a 9.4% year-on-year decline in revenue last year, but the Times managed to beat that, with a 10.6% drop in Q1. And its publisher wants to tell other media moguls how to run their companies...

A must read for entrepreneurs. This is already widely linked, but just in case you haven't seen it VC Fred Wilson posts a think piece about the shortcomings of M&A as a liquidity path and provokes a fascinating discussion. There are the usual number of just plain naive comments, but it's held together by a great dialog among thoughtful veterans like Robert Seidman, Jeff Jarvis, Marc Hedlund and Fred himself. I intend a longer post in this direction, but for now just read the whole thing.

Azeroth invites you... to a science conference in virtual reality. That would be Worlds of Warcraft, not Second Life, though. All the meeting swag is virtual, and after the poster session they'll storm a city. I like the way those guys party. (Hat tip to Ann Laurie.)

Friday Eye Candy. Here's some fine photography to take you off to the weekend. I remember the old drive-in theatre out past Coyote Point, but it was already deserted what I arrived.

The Roving Eye: Bogus Recession?, Bad Voodoo, CA's Favorite Export

Recession Limited to MSM? As opposed to the media atmospherics, the actual growth and inflation numbers are about the same as 2000, the end of the Clinton era. Of course, they are being treated very differently. Wonder why? Just another example to show that those making business and investing judgments based on journalists' writings are likely to get what they deserve. Update: More here.

Bad Voodoo At War. Tonight PBS' Frontline series will premier a documentary of a National Guard platoon caught up in the 'surge' in Iraq. The footage was shot by the soldiers themselves, and the editor seems to be trusted by the milblogs crowd, so perhaps we will get a portrayal free of the usual cant. For you Bay Area folks, it's on at 10PM this evening on KQED. I'll be watching.

A Zin A Day Keeps The Doctor Away. They keep finding out that red wine, or more accurately its antioxidant ingredient resveratrol, is beneficial to your health. First heart disease, now cancer treatment and side effects of diabetes seem to be benefited. Who knows, maybe it's good for healing broken limbs as well. Just in case, I'll have another.

Good On LiveLeak. After initially kowtowing to threats of Islamist violence and removing the controversial Fitna video, LiveLeak has now improved its security arrangements and reinstated the video. LiveLeak took a drubbing from the blogosphere when they caved, so they deserve some credit for manning up.

Silicon + Carbon = Nano-tech

I've long held that the deliberate manipulation of matter at the molecular level would evolve at the interface between the silicon processing industry and biotechnology. The latter has access to the tremendous, but unorganized and partially understood, genomic library of molecular tools provided by evolution. The former provides both the computing power to assist in analyzing that repository, and a ready market for some classes of nano-scale manipulation. (The path to product is notably shorter in the land of Moore's Law than with anything that must go past the FDA.) The intersection of C and Si is fertile territory for innovation and investment, much more so than any attempts at a completely de novo invention of molecular manufacturing a la Drexler.

The latest sprout on this ground is a set of 'designer enzymes' to break a carbon-hydrogen bond in a particular molecule, an innovation created at UCLA and U. of Wash. Previous work had yielded an engineered enzyme that would break carbon-carbon bonds at specific locations. An enzyme is just a large protein molecule, built out amino acids specified by a DNA sequence. This sequence, once built, can be spliced into bacterial or other host genomes and used to produce the enzyme in bulk.

Cut-and-try 'forward' experiments involving building trial DNA sequences, expressing them as enzymes, and testing for activity would have been impractical, considering the complexity of both the reaction to be mediated, and the folding details of the protein making up the enzyme. Instead these proteins were modeled in silico for activity before attempting synthesis. That's one of the directions I'm suggesting above. It's probably not all that long before the loop is completed, and we have bio-derived chemistry being used to assemble portions of silicon based systems, such as sensors and interconnects.

Interestingly, this project was funded by DARPA. Those interested in the direction of future innovations can do far worse than keep an eye on DARPA's basic technology offices, which have an lengthy record of spotting leverage points to open up new paths of development.

Review: Ira Brodsky's "The History of Wireless"

I first got into wireless in my early teens. Kit-built an Allied 'Knight Kit' regenerative receiver. Then the obligatory Heathkit superhet shortwave set. Held an amateur ticket for a while, and scratch-built a small transmitter. All vacuum tubes, of course. Bread-boarded a few transistor circuits as well.

Wireless technology was still fairly transparent back then. Once you'd built that much gear, you knew the basic designs. If a neighbor or relative brought over a defunct radio or TV for the kid to mess with, it would have big fat wires that you could easily trace to figure out the circuits and deduce what was probably cooked. A multimeter and surplus oscilloscope were sufficient test gear. Tubes unplugged and could be tested separately. More basics and a lot of the history were available from ARRL publications, my father's old textbooks, even Boy Scout merit badge materials. The whole field of consumer level wireless was then about 50 years old, and much of its history still featured in general science texts.

A kid or curious adult interested in wireless today has a much harder task. Take apart the most easily accessible sample - a dead mobile phone - and you've got a bunch of parts opaque to all but experts. Just try to figure out a RAKE filter by staring at a few IC packages and a multilayer circuit board. With the advent of digital signal processing, even getting a start in comprehension involves understanding a very complex two-way system. No one bothers fixing the gadgets. If they flake out, they're eWaste. As far as a beginner building one, just forget it.

The existence of wireless is taken for granted, being over a hundred years old, with the start of effective use now beyond living memory. You may get some mention of twitching frog's legs and spark gaps in a science text these days, but the path from there to the Star Trek communicator you can get for nearly free at the local mobile store has become obscure.

Ira Brodsky's recent History of Wireless is meant to fill the gap between initial discovery and today's mobiles that (along with the Internet) are remaking global communications. The author is a long time technologist and consultant in the mobile phone arena, but he reaches all the way back to the discovery of electricity itself to begin his story. From there we go through the interaction between electric and magnetic fields, the first instances of wireless transmission, and into the vacuum tube era that made it practical for everyday use.

The Roving Eye: Arthur C. Clarke, Partial Weight Bearing, Sony Brand Destruction

RIP, Sir Arthur C. Clarke. I was in a seventh grade reading class, and had run through all the required in-classroom assignments, when my teacher reached into her desk drawer and came up with something to keep me amused. The first book in the stack wasn't by Clarke, it was Asimov's Pebble in the Sky, but the second or third was Clarke's 'The Wind from the Sun'. As Bruce Webster said in his great obit, that was two of the big three of the time right there (I came to Heinlein later). I'd been introduced to Tolkien's work the year before, and the combination of greats produced a fascination, if not sometime addiction, to speculative fiction and fantasy. My copies of Clarke's later works have since gone off to war, but I was unable to part with his early stories: Winds, 'Against The Fall of Night' and 'Tales from the White Hart' are still right here. Thank you for a life-long pleasure, Sir Arthur.

Trouble on the Network Line. The wireless network at the home office has been up and down all week for causes still not completely diagnosed. A bad combination with limited mobility. It did get me over my case of procrastination in replacing an aged 'Snow' version Apple Airport, so there's a brand new Airport Extreme sitting here for installation over the weekend. Blogging will become more frequent when I don't have to crutch my way up and down stairs to get at the network.

The Second Act Begins. The surgeon likes the progress on my leg's healing, so now I'm up to 50% weight bearing, and on crutches rather than a walker. And my physical therapist proved to me this morning that 50% is actually more than that ankle really want to hold up just yet. A tib-fib break this bad dumps lots of coagulated blood and other junk into the ankle and even knee joint. I'll probably be back to being able to carry full weight well before I have the flexibility to fully use it. Next milestone: Enough ankle flex to run the accelerator and brake!

Morita-san Must Be Spinning In His Grave. It took Sony decades to build up from exporting cheap transistor radios to having a brand that could command a premium price for its Trinitrons and other audio and video components. It appears all that brand equity is being frittered away over about the same period. Sony entirely lost its Walkman position in the transition to MP3, compromised by its content investments. It's an also-ran in flat panel TV - the Koreans are duking it out for the lead position. Then the root kit fiasco, again propelled by its content bias. Now the company wants to charge customers $49 for removing the pre-installed bloatware on its Vaio laptops. And then backed down under pressure within 24 hours - of course leaving the Web debris to come up on any future searches about the Vaio. I suppose I can in some sense understand the reasoning - I'm sure there are bounties from signups and upgrades from the preloads that are figured into the product's P&L - but a few clues by the relevant product managers would have told them the downside was much worse. Sony seems to have lost its way in the network age, and I'm guessing it's not going to find it until the shareholders unsheathe their kitanas and take a few management heads. This kind of tin ear tends to start at the top.

Telling The Story, Missing The Point. Via the Blogfather, Popular Mechanics touts Konarka's Power Plastic polymer solar cells and substrate. The company is going after roll-to-roll processing to drastically reduce the costs of solar power. Good so far, but the magazine then fails completely to ask or research the questions that determine whether it's of any use: What's the efficiency? How does that substrate hold up under the sun it's meant to capture? And why is this product still in vapor three years after it was given an innovation award? That's the kind of thing customers or investors might like to know, not a few quotes wrapped around a press release.

The Roving Eye: Email Hypoxia, Content Hubris, DARPA For The Wounded

Google Mail Hacks. Not only is GMail free, but there are hidden features that make it more valuable. Your account can actually be reached two different domains, and you can tweak the address and still have it delivered. These tricks can further improve spam filitering, or give you a handle on content organization or figuring out the 'social spread' of your contact information.

Is Email Causing Hypoxia? Old Friend Linda Stone notices she holds her breath while the e-mail is downloading and takes off from there on the potential physiological impacts of electronic communications. There's a nice discussion of various breath control disciplines in the comments. I'm pretty sure I don't do this - having started with e-mail back in the '80s with a stylin' 300 baud modem, I'd probably have fallen over unconscious long since. And considering some of the messages that arrive in e-mail, one might want to consider disciplines like tactical breathing along with the fluffy bunny versions. HT: Clive Thompson.

Why Is It That Content And Hubris Go Together? Jeff Nolan catches the video-on-demand providers repeating the RIAA's mistake - crippling the customer's experience. With more and more entertainment options available every year, self-sabotaging a competitive position makes no sense. Maybe the ABC folks should call up Sony and ask how it's been working for them?